I did another ‘trailer run’ to school today. When I got home I started to think about how much carbon I am saving by using pedal power to do the school run. Also, what are the cost savings in doing so? And how long would it take to recover the cost of the trailer?
So I set to work putting together a spreadsheet in Google Docs to log my miles cycled where normally I would be using the car. This was the easy part, the next task was to :
1. Find out how much it costs per mile to run the car
2. Find out the carbon emissions of my car.
I know that my Citroën Picasso averages 34 mpg which equates to 7.46 miles per litre. The price of petrol at the moment is around 109p per litre. I can work out from this that it costs 14.57p per mile when using the car.
For the exact carbon emissions I did a little searching and came across the ballpark figure for an average sized petrol car of 2.4kg per litre.
So armed with this information my statistics as of 22/04/2010 are:
| Total miles cycled | Cost saving | Petrol saved(litres) | Carbon saved(kg) |
| 9.96 | £1.45 | 1.33 | 3.20 |
As for recouping the cost of the trailer? Well I would need to cycle 1372 miles which equates to 413 school runs. Gulp :-(. Better start pedalling…